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A few months ago (Dec. 5, 2005), The New Yorker had a cover showing a butch, cigar- smoking, beer-guzzling, hamburger-scarfing Dick Cheney reclining in a barcolounger while a wifey-looking, apron-sporting, feather duster-toting George W. Bush stands beside him looking lost and perplexed. While amusing and certainly in alignment with my politics (indeed I enjoy a good Bush bashing as much as the next left-leaning New Yorker reader), the cover struck me as an uncharacteristically cheap slam. Depicting the President (ouch..it still hurts to call him that) and his imperial vice as a dysfunctionally domestic top and bottom seemed a bit more Mad Magazine than Malcolm Gladwell. When I opened my mail box and looked at my new issue of the New Yorker last night, many of the same feelings returned. There on the cover was an image of Dick Cheney and George W. in jeans and cowboy hats engaged in a mock iconic Brokeback embrace. In addition, Cheney was blowing the smoke off his six shooter—an obvious and timely reference to his recent confusion of man and quail. I found the cartoon quite clever and quietly celebrated the flamboyant gesture of administration bashing, but I was struck, once again, by a sense of unease. It seems to me this kind of gratuitously emasculating parody is the last desperate resort of the political critic and it constitutes a flagrant departure from the magazine’s heritage of subtlety and sophistication. I do not turn to the New Yorker for broad burslesque or cheap political hack jobs. I turn to it as the one of the last bastions of intelligently informed, defiantly independent thought. I turn to it to see the hyper-articulate, passionately political Hendrick Hertzberg ripping W a new asshole with his pen. I turn to it to see W's deceptions debunked and his incompetence exposed. I do not turn to it to see him in a skirt. Somehow, it seems to cheapen the institution. (I’m talking about the New Yorker, not the Presidency). Not to be grandiose, but in some way it brings to mind the most compelling argument against torture: That it hurts the practitioner as much as the victim.
OK. I've probably overstated the case. But I think you get the idea. I think there's a longer analysis to be made of the way traditionally urbane journalistic institutions like the New York Times and the New Yorker that usually keep their editorializing very deadpan in tone have been seduced by the culture of comedic commentary (notably by the success of The Daily Show) into adopting a broader and more aggressively snarky voice. I think most journalists (like most everyone else) are frustrated comics and they just want to migrate to where the fun is. But in this instance, they do so at the cost of a certain unsettling inconsistency of tone and a certain erosion of intellectual and moral authority.
IDEA OF THE DAY:
While we're busy outsourcing the defense of our ports to countries in the middle east...why don't we just outsource the entire administration? Just a thought.
ALSO, WHILE WE'RE AT IT, A BRIEF NOTE ON THE KNICKS' TRADE:
The Knicks traded Penny Hardaway and Trevor Ariza for Stevie Francis. OK, now we have another ex all-star shoot-first point guard with a bloated contract in the backcourt. Nice. Stevie Franchise and Stephon Disenfranchise. Who knows? Maybe it’s just so perfectly stupid that it’ll work out.
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Posted on 2/22/2006
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